Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not particularly expert with Motion, but I’ve done a few things with it on the strength of some tutorials and a book called “How to Cheat in Motion”, and I’d be surprised if there’s anything in that video that couldn’t be done in Motion if you put the time and effort into it.
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I’ve heard that there’s a couple of others about, e.g., melodyne (spelling??), but it’s not really my area. Maybe try a more music orientated thread…
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Importing it into FCP is the easy bit, just save it as an aiff that’s at 48kHz and either 16 or 24 bit and you can drop it into your project or bin.
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There’s always going to be some issues with heavily compressed codecs. What a long GOP means is that the frames are a mixture of encodings that are called “I”, “B” and “P” and of those only the “I” frames actually have all the information required to display the frame and the “B” and “P” frames need the computer to add information from the other frames before/after them, so whenever you do a cut you’re changing the sequence of frames, so the encoding of a whole bunch of frames before and after the cut falls down and the computer has to do a load of processing to rebuild them in a way that’ll play. (It’ll cut fine if the last frame of the outgoing shot and the first frame of the next shot are both “I” frames, but you don’t know which frame is which coding). Codecs that use all “I” frames are fine (as a couple of people have mentioned) but have much higher bit rates.
Also, compression chucks away information in a way that doesn’t look bad when you just watch the shots, but I really messes up your ability to derive keys from it, e.g., getting green screen composites to work is a real pain if the footage is compressed.
There’s another issue that I’ve encountered, which is that TV broadcasting is compressed and if you compress pictures that have already been compressed, especially with a different codec, the picture quality takes a nose dive. It’s called concatenation and you can get hours of grief if what you supply to a broadcaster fails their technical standards.
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I’d second what Walter says, if I were doing the animation I’d do it in Motion rather than FCP…
Bear in mind that for HD the fully zoomed in picture needs to be 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high, so if you work out the difference between the widest and tightest zoom position that’ll be required you can get an idea of how big the widest view has to be. I don’t know what the biggest sized import can be (anyone know??) but it might be worth considering supplying the image as a series of blocks – as long as they’re seamless when they’re butted up together to make a composite image they can be joined together to make a virtual giant image to do big zooms in several different ways (depending on the software being used).
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I just mix in FCP for non-critical stuff, things like straightforward interviews for the web, and I’ve put Audio Hijack Pro and PPMulator on my system which I find helps me a lot doing that. (Not that you ever mix to levels, but I’ve been using PPMs for years so I’m very comfortable with them and it enables me to meet broadcast delivery specs).
I’ve used Soundtrack Pro for a few things (like noise reduction), but if it’s a important or complicated mix I take it to a dubbing mixer. It’s partly that someone specialising in sound mixing will do a better job than I can and partly that you need to have properly set up speakers in an acoustically neutral room to hear the subtleties properly, which I don’t have. So I tend to choose the guy and let him use whatever gear he/she’s most comfortable with.
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By mix I mean cross-fade. But if it’s random that changes my mind. Is the audio all at 48kHz?
I notice that there’s been a few threads about this kind of thing, so it could be worthwhile searching through them…
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+1 to Zane and Raphael’s answers.
I guess that’ll be the consensus view, you’re effectively barred from doing other work so you should be paid for your time even if your not actually working (it’s certainly what my agency would say).
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As it happens where there’s a mix it may be a bad render, so if you get rid of the mix and remake it, that might fix it.
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I’ve just had a look on the scopes and you’re right!
However, I don’t think it makes that much difference when you adjust your monitor – the idea is that PLUGE (which I recall stands for picture lineup generating equipment) has a bar that’s lower than black, a bar that’s precisely black and a bar that’s slightly higher than black and you adjust so that the bar that’s black is indistinguishable from the darker than black one and you can see the brighter one. As the difference between black and non-black is less on the PAL ones, I’d say that that’s the better test than the HD ones as the bigger differences allow for a bit more variation in setting what looks right.